Kathleen Siminyu

Kathleen Siminyu is an Artificial Intelligence Researcher working in Natural Language Processing. She is a researcher at DAIR, the distributed AI research institute. Kathleen focuses her research on African languages as a form of activism and from a desire to see these languages better represented on digital platforms. In her research, Kathleen has worked on resources for Kiswahili speech recognition as part of the Mozilla Common Voice project, on machine translation for four Kenyan languages as part of Masakhane and on phoneme transcription for Luhya languages in collaboration with Neulab at CMU.

Kathleen also works with African AI communities to enable ecosystem capacity building and research relevant to Africa. For some of these efforts, Kathleen was listed as one of the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 for 2022. She continues to organise with communities as part of the Deep Learning Indaba, where she is a trustee and the Masakhane Research Foundation, where she is a director. Among her other contributions to the African AI ecosystem, Kathleen served as Regional Coordinator of AI4D Africa in the first 2 years of the programme’s inception and was part of an African Union expert consultative committee working to develop a continental strategy for Artificial Intelligence in Africa.